Fitness & Lifestyle

How Reading Before Bed Can Improve Your Sleep (And Why Speculative Fiction is So Powerful)

There are all kinds of hacks for improving sleep: getting more sunlight during the day, dimming the lights at night, wearing blue-blocker glasses, doing regular exercise, having a warm shower before bed, and the list goes on.

Some of them, like getting enough sunlight and doing regular exercise, are an important part of living a healthy lifestyle, and they can certainly help a great deal, but there’s an underlying factor that has a much greater bigger impact on the quality of our sleep: stress.

In fact, the sleep scientist Greg Potter, PhD, considers it the master factor. If you’re relaxed enough, then you can get away with having fairly poor sleep habits. But if you’re struggling with stress, no matter how many sleep hacks you adopt, none of it will be enough to cure your sleep problems.

Now, some of us carry high levels of chronic stress in the classic sense. If you’re struggling with that, you probably already know that it can be a problem, and I think this article might help. But even if you aren’t stressed in the classic sense, stress might still be interfering with your sleep.

For example, I wouldn’t describe myself as overly stressed or anxious. However, when I lie down to go to sleep at night, I still have a flurry of thoughts running through my head. I start thinking about articles I’m writing, how my son’s doctor’s appointment will go, or that business article I read the other day. None of these thoughts are necessarily bad, and in some cases, it’s an exciting or even inspiring kind of stress. Still, all of these thoughts running through my head prevent me from drifting off into a relaxed sleep.

That’s where reading comes in. And of all the genres, fantasy has some unique advantages.

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Announcing Outlift: Our Intermediate Bulking Program

Outlift Intermediate Bulking Program

After a few years of development and testing, we’re stoked to finally, finally announce our official intermediate bulking program.

This past year, while Jared was working on his general health and fitness program for skinny-fat guys, Outlive, Marco and I have been beta testing our intermediate bulking program, Outlift.

You can read all about it (and buy it) here: 

Outlift: Intermediate Bulking Program

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What happens if you lose weight without exercising?

Illustration of an overweight and a skinny guy

What do you think would happen if you lost weight by either:

  • Just dieting
  • Dieting and doing cardio workouts
  • Dieting, cardio, and weight training

Which protocol is going to cause the most weight loss? The most fat loss? And what’s going to happen to your muscle mass?

There are two studies that answer that question. But before we go over the results, try and guess what would happen. I think it could be fun to test your intuition.

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Why Are Overweight People So Muscular?

Illustration of an Overweight Person

As a skinny guy, I always wondered why overweight people were so much stronger than I was, especially in their lower bodies. I mean, I didn’t exercise and neither did they. I didn’t eat well, neither did they. Where was all that extra muscle coming from?

I understood how they had become overweight. I knew I had a small stomach, a meagre appetite, and a fast metabolism. My high metabolism was obvious to everyone who knew me—I was always fidgeting, always moving, always radiating heat. I was a classic ectomorph.

What I didn’t understand was how much muscle overweight people were gaining simply because they were overeating.

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Bony to Bombshell, our strength training program for women, is now in Beta!

Bony to Beastly is doing great. Our guys are doing fantastic, and they’re a fun and supportive bunch. Every couple weeks a new jaw-dropping transformation hits the member area, but everyone who’s nearing completion of the program is kicking some serious ass.

Word of our bony-boy muscle-building spread across the interwebs, and we started getting emails from women asking us to make a program for bony babes.

Always up for an experiment, Marco ran a girl through our Bony to Beastly program, bicep curls, beastly eating and all.

The result?

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